How The Israel-Hamas War Is Creating Calls For Mass Censorship

Written by Hudson Crozier

What’s happening: Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, faces heavy criticism after failing to remove violent content and terrorist propaganda related to Hamas’s recent attack on Israel. In Europe, governments have threatened Musk with fines. Similarly, American media outlets and “researchers” are using the Israel-Hamas war to argue for stricter content moderation across social media.

For example: Politico recently interviewed “misinformation expert” Graham Brookie, a former national security official who now works for the Atlantic Council, a government-funded think tank. Brookie and his organization have worked in tandem with federal agencies to censor dissenting opinions on voter fraud and vaccine efficacy, for which they now face a First Amendment lawsuit.

Why it matters: The argument goes beyond Hamas-related accounts and content, which would not be controversial to censor. Establishment voices are putting foreign terrorist content in the same broad category as “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech” that they say Americans should be protected from.

• It’s about power: The U.S. government has no problem with its own record of running fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter to promote war propaganda. The federal government has also falsely labeled the Biden family’s scandals as foreign disinformation so as to have them suppressed by social media platforms.

The bottom line: If the courts do not firmly restrict the government from targeting online speech, expect the establishment to exploit the problem of foreign terrorism by demanding extensive government control of the internet.